Archive will preserve stories of black US airmen

A research project exploring untold stories of black US Air Force personnel based in East Anglia during the Cold War has the potential to become one of the first and biggest archives of its kind, its project manager hopes.

Black USAF: Cultural Connections in Cold War East Anglia, led by Elma Glasgow from Cambridgeshire, was launched last year and includes first-hand recollections from people across the region.

Phase one, which saw various stories collected by the project team, has been completed and the team is hoping to expand it further.

Glasgow said eventually she hoped it would become the first and largest archive for these stories "ever captured in one place in the entire country".

Glasgow said the team exceeded an initial target of collecting six stories, managing to get 10 from Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.

The stories have since been posted on the project's website and include the launch story of Geno Washington, originally from Indiana, who found himself at RAF Woodbridge in the early 1960s before becoming a successful soul singer.

Another story came from Del Singh from Peterborough who grew up near RAF Alconbury and joined his dad on visits to the American bases with their market stall.

"He was just completely in awe of these guys," Glasgow explained.

"He said being a Sikh guy, it was something that was out of his sort of cultural knowledge and experience and that set him on a really interesting path.

"That's an interesting story from the perspective of that kind of cultural exchange between South Asian culture and black American culture that people wouldn't necessarily know about East Anglia."

The singer Nate James, whose dad was stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, spoke about the complexities of growing up in East Anglia surrounded by military and black American culture.

Glasgow said she was "really proud" of all the stories collated so far and it had been "really rewarding", but she said the project was still keen to hear from more women about their experiences on the bases.

The team are going to deposit the stories into local archives in each county, but Glasgow hoped they would eventually form part of a larger archive.

"This has got huge potential," she said.

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